Cut-Up / Splice
Cut-Up / Splice is music made from abrupt edits, rearranged fragments, tape joins, sample interruptions, speech shards, stolen media, and montage logic. Its sound is discontinuous by design: voices jump contexts, rhythms are amputated and reassembled, pop fragments collide with radio noise, and meaning comes from the cut as much as from the source. It can be literary, comic, political, psychedelic, documentary, or aggressively anti-copyright.
History
The style draws from Dada collage, film montage, musique concrète, and magnetic-tape editing, then becomes explicit through William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s tape cut-ups, which treated recorded language as material to be sliced and recombined. In later decades, Negativland, John Oswald, The Tape-beatles, People Like Us, The Evolution Control Committee, Cassetteboy, and other media-collage artists used splicing, sampling, and digital edits to critique advertising, broadcasting, authorship, and pop memory. Cut-up practice shaped plunderphonics, industrial tape work, hip-hop sampling, mashup culture, glitch editing, political audio collage, and the jump-cut language of internet video.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- UbuWeb
- Electronic Music Foundation references
- AllMusic
- Discogs